Unbelievable how Americans can be so brainwashed about their country's status in the world yet believe that they're completely "free"
The real issue is there is a risk that economically speaking America is less free than China. For all that what China does with intellectual property is illegal under American law, it is very free. The US would for sure like them to be a little less free with IP. America's policies over interest rates also look decidedly like the sort of thing that a centrally planned economy would try and execute; it handicaps building savings which might give China an advantage if they are more middle-class-savings-tolerant.
That is balanced by the strictly superior American rule of law, for all its warts. But America has given themselves some interesting competitive handicaps.
POSTSCRIPT https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_tax_reven... For reference, China has a ratio of 4:1 private to public income vs America with a 2.6:1 ratio. Technically, China might be running a smaller government. Or lying, it is hard to know.
POSTPOSTSCRIPT Hong Kong and Taiwan are nearly 9:1. Capitalist paradise is in Asia. Nothing lower down the list looks appealing to me.
The rule of law is looking pretty tattered and worn in the US of A right now. What with the President committing obstruction of justice in plain view and his AG declaring that a sitting President may not be indicted for any crime.
Not to mention the grotesque violations of human rights that are happening at the network of concentration camps the current administration has repurposed.
A hundred thousand illegal immigrants per month are being caught crossing into the US through the southern border.
No other liberal democracy - from Canada to Finland to Japan to Australia - would tolerate such a flood of illegal immigration. Not even remotely close. Canada freaks out when a couple thousand illegal immigrants cross into its territory from the US in a given month.
Holding illegal immigrants in detention facilities, because there is nowhere else to put them until they can be processed, is not the same thing as a concentration camp. Claiming that they're the same thing is a gross abuse of the term and its history.
Why can't America try paying the cost of its actions for once, instead of pushing those costs on innocent families and children fleeing famine and violence?
Fault Trump with everything that's his fault, but suggesting that this is a precursor to mass graves and genocide is just hyperbole.
In my personal experience, "concentration camp" has been applied specifically to mean the camps operated by the German government in the 1930's and 40's, camps which intentionally tortured and murdered millions of innocent Jews, and certain other "undesirables" and enemies of the Nazi regime.
When I hear that term, I personally think of emaciated prisoners wearing striped uniforms, packed into cramped wooden shelves. I think of hopeless people peering out from behind barbed wire fences suffering under a regime of forced labor and starvation. I think of horrific death chambers filled with poison gas and choking, dying human beings and towering piles of dead bodies.
I personally can't get those images out of my head when I hear the term "concentration camp" and I would guess most other people in the US conjure up the same images specifically tied to Nazi Germany when they hear that term.
But NPR has an interesting article about the meaning and historical usage of "concentration camp." The subject arose when someone used the term to describe the sites where Japanese Americans were forcibly relocated during WWII.
https://www.npr.org/sections/publiceditor/2012/02/10/1466917...
No, it isn't. Concentration camps have existed throughout history and they haven't always been associated with genocide. But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.
The fact that it's not literally the holocaust doesn't mean it's not a concentration camp.
It still is, because a "concentration camp" even in that sense still isn't just any camp where people are concentrated. It implies internment without charges, which is exactly what isn't happening here -- there is every expectation that there will be a proceeding to determine their immigration status, resulting in either release or deportation and not indefinite internment in violation of habeas corpus.
> But, you know, they do have a connotation of being associated with violations of human rights which is exactly what people are alleging about these detention sites.
Then make that claim and not the other one. If they have no access to soap then assert that as the thing that needs to be fixed -- because at least that can be fixed. How do you make a detention facility not a "concentration camp" under a definition of "concentration camp" that just means any detention facility?
You might just have to accept that in order to enforce some laws you're going to have to put people in mass detention and you may as well own that instead of trying to get people to not call it what it is because the term for it makes you uncomfortable.
The 1951 Convention on the Status of Refugees grants refugees very specific rights that are absolutely being violated by this policy, and the term "concentration camp" has been used in many other cases other than WWII concentration camps to mean exactly the thing the U.S. is doing to refugees on the southern border. I definitely consider them concentration camps, while as yet not being death camps. There already should be holy hell to pay for having done yet again what we promised never to do the last time we had concentration camps, for Japanese-American citizens.
https://www.sltrib.com/opinion/editorial/2019/06/22/tribune-...
The word nation is not found in either the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution. I consider nationalism, nationalistic movements, to be anti-freedom, they engender only division, hatred, enemy seeking, scapegoating, and laws to protect and enhance such things. Who is free in the U.S.? Perhaps citizens? There is even a movement that only natural born citizens are real citizens, and naturalized citizens are second class and could have citizenship stripped from them after the fact if they violate certain laws. It's not enough to imprison them, they have to be stripped of citizenship, in this view.
What about all persons within the U.S. are they free? The constitution applies mostly to persons, not just citizens. Most all individual rights and protections apply to persons; citizens get some extra privileges like holding federal public office. And yet a great many Americans are very confused about this, thinking constitutional law, rights and protections only apply to citizens.
Therefore I put nationalism as my specific enemy of the American dream, and of freedom. Patriotism is quite nice, in particular as it relates to America as an asylum for most of its history. But when patriotism is infected with nationalism, it becomes jingoism, and that's dangerous. Eventually no one is free.
Yes, we do still have freedom of speech and association.
But the govt is attacking freedom of religion through "religious freedom" laws that allow discrimination against people who don't follow Christian behavior, in the opinion of any random Christian.
The president attacks the free press, labeling them traitors and "enemy of the people."
When part of the 1st amendment is under attack, all of it is.
The president says if you plead the 5th, you must be guilty.
The president wants to delay the census until he gets the answer that he wants from the supreme court.
When some of the Bill of Rights, and the Constitution in general, are under attack, then all of it is.
We are at risk of losing what was thought rock solid, and so we are that much less free. We may still be better off than some, but we are slowly losing that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Amendment_to_the_Unite...
It’s an artifact of the original founding of the country where there were checks and balances put in place to deny direct democratic rule.
It’s been slowly rolled back over many years, but until we get rid of the electoral college, it always has the possibility of ignoring the will of the people.
This is technically correct. Less accurate, but implied, is that a majority of voters wanted a different president. That may be the case, but the evidence is not sufficient to confirm or reject it.
First off is that turnout is very low relative to the number of eligible voters. Secondly is that the electoral college and states' decision to only do "all-or-nothing" apportionment means that it's a totally rational decision to stay home if your state is not close, since your vote has no chance of affecting the election besides the value of signalling that opposition to the consensus exists.
If Lessig's scheme [1] works out to break the winner-take-all apportionment, we could at least start to see some meaningful turnouts because the battle for a single electoral vote can be a close contest. More likely to succeed by less interesting (because your vote does not contribute to a single outcome but just to the collective) we have the interstate compact [2], which this year has made good progress towards achieving a majority.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Popular_Vote_Intersta...
I'm a firm believer US ballots are way too broad and have people direct electing (almost always first past the post) way too many positions, especially esoteric and irreverent ones like justices, sheriffs, school boards, etc. For representative democracy to legitimately work we need people electing representatives to appoint and delegate the responsibilities of government on their behalf, because of those that actually do vote (only about 60% of voting age peoples do) 99% don't actually vet individual candidates for every one of the 12+ direct elections they are participating in on the ballot every year.
Even when I try to do that, information on these esoteric position candidates is so sparse and I'm so hugely unqualified to judge what makes a good district magistrate or police chief its mostly a waste of time - I end up going off very limited information on anyone running, often people running without opponents, for positions whose function I cannot fully understand because specialization for my locality on whatever they do isn't readily available.
That is a fully intentional design, though. Both parties have it in their self interest to bloat the ballot with tons of esoteric positions so voters feel choice paralysis and fatigue and just start voting party line en masse without actually auditing the people they are actually electing.
Its a mockery of democracy and republicanism, though. I should be voting for a professional representative to make these decisions on my behalf in forum, and if I did only have a, preferably, singular elected role I vote for with multiple winners where I just need to judge all the candidates for that one function whom I could then rank at the ballot people would be much less privy to falling under the total influence of party lines when voting. Which, being against the interest of the ruling duopoly, would never practically happen anywhere except where the demographics are so skewed in favor of one or the other they are nigh guaranteed to win anyway.
By definition a party loyalist is not a deliberative person, as described in Federalist 68. And further, party loyalists are the people most centrally located in bitter partisanship, the very thing that lends itself to "cabal, intrigue, and corruption" referred to as things most to be avoided, in Federalist 68.
We have all permitted this perversion of something that, despite its also racist past, could actually be useful but is instead detrimental. The Electoral College could play a role if we were serious, but Americans right now take their TV shows more seriously.
Bicameral parliamentary systems are even less prone to this since the prime minister is elected by the ruling coalition. But they have other problems.
2. All systems will be gamed.
3. The people are not the players, they are the chips.
Its all hyperbole overshadowing the root problem - first past the post non-proportional elections are hugely undemocratic. You need proportional legislatures where you have both multiple winners per race for better proportional distribution and alternate votes to first past the post regardless of what they are - STV, ranked choice, IRV, etc. Anything is better than what we have now.
What we really need is approval voting / range voting. First past the post creates polarization because it causes there to be two parties and requires every issue to be bifurcated into on of those two boxes, and if your preferences don't all perfectly align with party lines then welcome to hell.
But the problem with proportional representation systems is that they would require flipping over the table in the US. Senators are from specific states, Congressmen are from specific districts, and that part of the system isn't the broken part, it's actually helpful -- if your state or district has a specific problem then you have a specific person who actually cares about it because your vote matters more to them than the vote of someone else in some other place.
But apply range voting to the same districts and states and you don't end up with a two party system, because two very similar candidates no longer split the vote with each other. Then anybody who can represent a given district or state better than the incumbent can win the election regardless of party affiliation, and you're no longer stuck choosing between two party platforms because now there are twelve.
What we really need is for everyone to vote.
Or, for nobody to vote, which would trigger chaos. As Mel Brooks said, "Out of chaos, comes order."
If the people who currently vote are a representative sample of all people eligible to vote, this would change nothing at all.
They're not, so what would end up happening is that both parties would spend more time pandering to the people who currently could vote but don't, the additional votes would end up split evenly between the two parties and the difference from the status quo would be modest at best.
First past the post creates a polarized two party system independent of what percentage of the population votes.
> Or, for nobody to vote, which would trigger chaos.
That would never happen because the fewer people who vote the more incentive there is for anyone go to vote, because your vote counts more when other people don't.
It's more effective in general to cast a protest vote for a third party you know won't win than to stay home -- especially since they often need a certain percentage of the vote for ballot access or public financing. And if enough people do that then the third party actually wins. Then ideally they can do away with first past the post.
This is squarely in the territory of religion.
People in dense urban areas should not have a dictatorial say in what those who live in rural areas do.
If democracies like the USA (Canada has a similar problem) simply counted the votes, the majority of the country would be happier with the outcome. From a pragmatic standpoint, this is a good thing.
"U.S. Cities are Home to 62.7 Percent of the U.S. Population, but Comprise Just 3.5 Percent of Land Area"
https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2015/cb15-33....
The developed world is becoming more urban because we do not need that many people in the rural industries any more. It's that simple. Fighting for their 'rights' just makes the country non-competitive. We need to actively incentivize and assist those in rural areas find a way of life where the economy is actually happening.
As it is I could have a substantial unequal share in representative interest moving to a sparsely populated state than I would living in a major metro area. There is absolutely no way to consider that as anything other than a mockery of democracy.